Hezbollah has vowed to keep its weapons, rejecting a US-backed disarmament proposal amid increasing pressure from the Lebanese government and Israeli threats following new airstrikes and a cross-border incursion.

“This threat will not make us accept surrender,” Hezbollah chief Sheikh Naim Qassem said in a televised speech on Sunday, warning they will not abandon their weapons and insisting that Israel’s “aggression” must first stop.

“How can you expect us not to stand firm while the Israeli enemy continues its aggression, continues to occupy the five points, and continues to enter our territories and kill?” said Qassem, who succeeded longtime terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah after Israel killed him last year.

Hezbollah’s response came as the Lebanese government involved the Iran-backed terror group while crafting a reply to US envoy Tom Barrack’s proposal, which called for Israel to halt attacks on Lebanese soil in exchange for the group’s disarmament.

“We will not be part of legitimizing the occupation in Lebanon and the region. We will not accept normalization [with Israel],” Qassem said in his speech.

“America’s equation asking us to choose between being killed or surrender does not concern us and we will cling to our rights,” the terrorist leader continued.

On Monday, Barrack said he was “unbelievably satisfied” with Lebanon’s response to Washington’s recent proposal on disarming Hezbollah, following meetings between American and Lebanese leaders in Beirut.

This latest proposal, presented to Lebanese officials during Barrack’s visit on June 19, calls for Hezbollah to be fully disarmed within four months in exchange for Israel halting airstrikes and withdrawing troops from the five occupied posts in southern Lebanon.

Speaking to reporters after meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun on Monday, Barrack said he had received the official response but did not disclose any details about its contents.

“What the government gave us was something spectacular in a very short period of time,” Barrack said. “I’m unbelievably satisfied with the response.”

The US envoy said he believed “the Israelis do not want war with Lebanon.”

“Both countries are trying to give the same thing — the notion of a stand-down agreement, of the cessation of hostilities, and a road to peace,” Barrack continued.

Last fall, Israel decimated Hezbollah’s leadership and military capabilities with an air and ground offensive, following the group’s attacks on Jerusalem — which they claimed were a show of solidarity with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas amid the war in Gaza.

In November, Lebanon and Israel reached a US-brokered ceasefire agreement that ended a year of fighting between the Jewish state and Hezbollah.

Under the agreement, Israel was given 60 days to withdraw from southern Lebanon, allowing the Lebanese army and UN forces to take over security as Hezbollah disarms and moves away from Israel’s northern border.

However, Israel maintained troops at several posts in southern Lebanon beyond the ceasefire deadline, as its leaders aimed to reassure northern residents that it was safe to return home.

Jerusalem has continued carrying out strikes targeting remaining Hezbollah activity, with Israeli leaders accusing the group of maintaining combat infrastructure, including rocket launchers — calling this “blatant violations of understandings between Israel and Lebanon.”

The post Hezbollah Rejects US-Backed Disarmament Proposal first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

As Iranian officials flail about, arresting hundreds of innocent people and executing “dozens” of alleged spies, now is a good time to recall that among all the things the Islamic Republic is terrible at, its feeble attempts at counter-espionage stand out as especially inept. While the Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) and other regime goons search frantically in the most bizarre places for foreign and domestic enemies, an intricate espionage network has been growing right under their noses.

Israeli intelligence officers have been smuggling weapons, drones, communication gear, and even vehicles into Iran for years using “suitcases, trucks and tankers.” They and their Iranian agents have been spreading equipment throughout the Islamic Republic.

And what have Iran’s “crazy state” counterespionage professionals been doing?

In 2007, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported that “in recent weeks intelligence operatives have arrested 14 squirrels within Iran’s borders … The squirrels were carrying spy gear of foreign agencies, and were stopped before they could act, thanks to the alertness of our intelligence agencies.” While the “alert” intelligence agents were preoccupied with spy squirrels, real spies were busy downloading the Stuxnet supervirus into Iran’s enrichment facilities, causing their centrifuges to spin out of control.

In October 2008, Iranian authorities detained two pigeons caught “spying” near the Natanz nuclear facility. Oddly enough, it was not the first case of suspected avian eavesdropping around Natanz. The Etemad Melli newspaper quoted Commander Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moqadam who confirmed the arrests and added that weeks earlier, “a black pigeon was caught bearing a blue-coated metal ring with invisible strings.” As Iranian authorities investigated birds, nearby, undetected Mossad agents photographed the reactor site, mapped entrances and ventilation shafts, and took GPS coordinates.

During the drought of 2017-18, Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali accused Israel of “working to ensure clouds entering Iranian skies are unable to release rain.” Jalali, then the head of Iran’s Civil Defense Organization, claimed that “Joint teams from Israel and one of the neighboring countries make the clouds entering Iran barren. Moreover, we are faced with the cases of cloud theft and snow theft.” While Iranian generals looked to the clouds, down on earth, Israeli spies catalogued the regime’s “safe houses.”

In February 2018, Hassan Firuzabadi, a senior military advisor to Khamenei, boasted about Iran’s success in detecting Western spies with an anecdote about a group of people who had infiltrated Iran with “a variety of reptile desert species like lizards, chameleons … We found out that their skin attracts atomic waves and that they were nuclear spies who wanted to find out where inside the Islamic Republic of Iran we have uranium mines and where we are engaged in atomic activities.”

General Firuzabadi, the former chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, couldn’t resist a taking a parting shot, boisterously claiming that Western spy agencies “failed every time.”

Of course, the real spies knew exactly where “atomic activities” were carried being out.

Prior to October 7, Israel had accomplished some remarkable feats of spy craft inside Iran. In addition to the Stuxnet caper, Israel killed Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the director of Iran’s nuclear program, on November 27, 2020. He wasn’t the first Iranian nuclear scientist to be eliminated, but Israeli spies accomplished the task with sci-fi panache using a remote-control gun just a few miles east of Tehran.

After October 7, Israel began eliminating its enemies throughout the Iranian terror empire, including Lebanon where on July 30, 2024, it killed Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah co-founder who masterminded the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut.

The very next day, on July 31, Israel foreshadowed what would come in the 2025 war by killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Its patient spies had smuggled a small bomb into the VIP guest house months prior to the assassination. The hit further degraded an already diminished Hamas, and its precision and timing embarrassed Iran’s leaders.

But it was not until the war that Israel demonstrated the extent to which its spies have been studying their targets, learning their habits and routines.

On the first day of the war, June 13, 2025, Israel knew the exact whereabouts of Hossein Salami, Commander of the IRGC, Mohammad Bagheri, Armed Forces Chief, Brigadier General Gholamali Rashid, and Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force. None lived to see the second day of the war.

Also on the first day of the war, Iran’s top nuclear scientists were hoodwinked into attending meetings and then killed simultaneously. One of them was Fereydoon Abbasi-Devani who, according to a Wall Street Journal report, recently claimed he had everything necessary to build a nuclear bomb. “If they tell me to build a bomb, I will build it,” he said.

On the final day of the war, Israel killed Sayyed Mohammad Reza Seddighi Saber, the head of the SPND, the agency in charge of nuclear explosion research. The US State Department had only recently come to fully address Saber’s importance, having sanctioned him in May. Israeli spies knew where he lived.

A ceasefire ended the war, but psychological operations continued. The normally secretive Mossad even released videos of its commandos assembling counter missile weapons inside Iran.

Though many top regime figures and nuclear scientists did not survive the brief war, those who did live in fear knowing that Israeli spies are watching them.

Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published by IPT.

The post Israel’s Brilliant Spy Accomplishments in the War Against Iran first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Yet again the BBC has come under increased scrutiny in the fallout over alternative hip-hop duo Bob Vylan‘s incendiary performance at the Glastonbury Festival. Despite chants of “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF,” the UK’s national broadcaster continued airing the live feed and kept the recording on its VOD service for several hours.

That Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, was physically present at Glastonbury on the day has only added to the pressure he is facing. But this controversy is only the latest in a string of embarrassing Israel-related scandals to plague the BBC since Davie’s 2020 appointment.

As the UK culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, recently stated in the House of Commons, “When you have one editorial failure, it’s something that must be gripped. When you have several, it becomes a problem of leadership.”

As many question whether Tim Davie’s head should roll, here’s a reminder (in no particular order) of some of the most egregious examples of Israel-related controversies that have marred the BBC’s image during his tenure:

1. The BBC Refuses to Refer to Hamas as “Terrorists”

Since 2021, the UK has designated the entirety of Hamas as a terrorist organization, widening its 2001 terror designation of the Palestinian group’s “military wing.”

Despite this official designation by the UK, its taxpayer-funded broadcaster refuses to refer to Hamas and its members as “terrorists,” preferring the more neutral and legitimizing term, “militant.”

In an attempt to justify this policy, the BBC’s World Affairs editor John Simpson explained that it doesn’t refer to Hamas as “terrorists” in order to maintain an objective tone and does not tell people “who to support and who to condemn.”

However, as HonestReporting discovered, the BBC has no qualms about using that term when referring to Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or other international terror organizations.

It seems that for the BBC under Tim Davie’s leadership, you’re a “terrorist” if you attack American or British targets but only a “militant” if you target Israelis.

 

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2. Gaza Documentary Pulled for “Serious Flaws”

In February 2025, the BBC was forced to apologize for “serious flaws” in a documentary that it had commissioned on the lives of Gazan children during the Israel-Hamas war.

Titled “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” the documentary was pulled from the British broadcaster’s streaming platform after investigative journalist David Collier revealed that the film’s teen narrator was the son of a Hamas minister and that his mother had been paid by the production company.

It was also discovered that there were several instances of mistranslation in a bid to sanitize the interviewee’s language. This included translating the Arabic word for “Jews” as “Israelis” or “Israeli forces” and translating “Jihad” as “battle” or “resistance.”

An @BBC news thread – for those who do not understand JUST HOW BAD the BBC Hamas propaganda documentary was. There have been several key scoops – and I thought I would bring the issues together.

Thread 

— David Collier (@mishtal) February 21, 2025

3. Parroting Hamas on Al-Ahli Hospital Blast

On October 17, 2023, the BBC fell for Hamas propaganda when it uncritically parroted the terror group’s claim that an Israeli airstrike had killed 500 people at Al-Ahli Hospital.

Hours later, it was determined by Israeli and American intelligence that it was a parking lot that had been hit and not the hospital building itself, that far fewer than 500 people had been killed, and that the blast was caused by an errant Islamic Jihad rocket and not an Israeli strike.

While the BBC was not the only mainstream media organization to willingly spread Hamas’ falsehoods without a second thought, the broadcaster’s correspondent Jon Donnison was so certain in the veracity of Hamas’ propaganda, that he took it even one step further, authoritatively declaring for his international audience that it was “hard to see what else this could be really given the size of the explosion other than an Israel airstrike or several airstrikes because when we’ve seen rockets fired out of Gaza, we never see explosions of that scale.”

Frankly this may have sent me a bit over the edge pic.twitter.com/DtFYdUiqJT

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) October 18, 2023

4. Al-Shifa Hospital: Vilifying Israel, Whitewashing Hamas

Another Gaza hospital and more BBC misreporting.

For years, it was known that Hamas was using the area of Al-Shifa Hospital as a command and control center and was breaking international law by embedding its terrorist forces within the civilian hospital complex.

However, when the IDF finally pushed to rout Hamas from the hospital grounds in November 2023, the BBC chose to misrepresent Israel’s actions and to whitewash Hamas’ criminal activities.

First, when initial reports were emerging that the IDF was operating in Al-Shifa, the BBC anchor read out the libelous claim that the military had announced that it was targeting medical professionals and Arabic speakers. In fact, the IDF had announced that it was bringing medical teams and Arabic speakers into the hospital in order to provide aid to the patients there.

The BBC later apologized for “this error, which fell below our usual editorial standards.”

The IDF clearly states it is bringing medical teams & Arabic speakers into Al-Shifa Hospital to help patients.@BBCNews reinterprets it to libel the IDF as *targeting* medical teams & Arabic speakers.

Just how much lower can the BBC go? https://t.co/I9kVy3MC87

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 15, 2023

5. The BBC Spreads 14,000 Babies Libel

In a May 2025 interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today program, UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher made the baseless claim that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within the next 48 hours if a flood of aid was not allowed into the blockaded enclave.

To the BBC’s credit, Fletcher’s statement was challenged during his interview, and the broadcaster conducted further investigation, proving that this claim was unfounded and was based on a gross misrepresentation of data about possible malnutrition in the coming year.

However, despite the appearance of journalistic due diligence, HonestReporting uncovered that the BBC was continuing to repeat Fletcher’s statement in various reports without any proper context or clarification.

When it comes to Israel, it seems that Tim Davie’s BBC prefers clickbait misinformation over proper journalism.

The UN’s humanitarian chief claims, without providing evidence, that 14,000 Gazan babies could die in the next 48 hours.

That would be some 27% of the total alleged death toll for this entire war. All babies. All within 48 hours.

This is how anti-Israel libels are spread. https://t.co/io5FJ80Eew pic.twitter.com/FlVqbNXnNh

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 20, 2025

6. BBC News Presenter: “The Israeli Forces Are Happy to Kill Children”

Even before the current Israel-Hamas war, the BBC had no qualms about spreading misinformation and libels about Israel and the IDF.

In a July 2023 interview with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett about an Israeli counter-terror operation in the Palestinian city of Jenin, BBC News presenter Anjana Gadgil questioned if the IDF had set out to kill children since four of those killed in the operation were under the age of 18 (while simultaneously ignoring that they were claimed as members by Palestinian terrorist organizations).

After Bennett ably handled her malicious question, Gadgil doubled down and accused the IDF of being “happy to kill children.”

Rather than asking serious journalistic questions, Gadgil seemed content to use her interview with Bennett as a means of amplifying her own anti-Israel libels.

What a despicable accusation, @bbc. No, Israel is not “happy to kill children.”

This isn’t journalism, it’s a blood libel. Thank you @naftalibennet for calling it out and opposing the moral equivalency between terrorists and those fighting them.

pic.twitter.com/7EictKD7H6

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 5, 2023

7. The BBC Misrepresents Hebrew Cry For Help as Anti-Muslim Slur

In November 2022, the UK media regulator Ofcom castigated the BBC for its continued misrepresentation of a Hebrew cry for help as an anti-Muslim slur.

In December 2021, a bus full of Jewish youths celebrating Hanukkah was surrounded by a group of men performing Nazi salutes and spitting at them.

After footage from inside the bus was leaked, the BBC claimed that the phrase “dirty Muslims” could be heard from within the bus. However, it was determined that it was rather a Hebrew speaker saying to “call someone, it’s urgent.”

Even when the BBC’s report was called into dispute, the broadcaster refused to apologize and continued to hold that an anti-Muslim slur could be heard from inside the bus.

In its report, Ofcom observed that the BBC failed to “observe its editorial guidelines” and “made a serious editorial misjudgment.”

.@HonestReporting welcomes @Ofcom‘s decision, prompted by ours & others who justifiably complained about the BBC’s appalling failure to meet basic journalistic standards. We call for further investigation into the BBC’s complaints procedures, which are clearly unfit for purpose. https://t.co/M5EnTtxASQ

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 7, 2022

8. BBC Panel: Are Jews an Ethnic Minority?

In March 2021, the BBC came under fire for hosting a panel discussion of mainly non-Jews on whether the Jewish people were an ethnic minority.

The panel was a response to a mistaken tweet by the deputy leader of the Scottish Labour Party that her party’s new leader was the “first ethnic minority leader of a political party…anywhere in the UK.” This claim appeared to discount Ed Miliband and Michael Howard, both Jewish former heads of the Labour and Conservative parties, respectively.

Instead of simply reporting on the erroneous tweet, the BBC chose to turn it into a panel discussion on the Jewish people’s status as an ethnic minority and whether they could be considered as such due to their successful integration within the UK.

As HonestReporting noted at the time:

To their credit, none of the panelists belittled the issue or dodged the issue, uniformly criticizing Rayner for her ill-advised tweet. That the panelists could do so, but the BBC couldn’t grasp how to properly frame the conversation, made for a striking juxtaposition.

“An insult to the Jewish community.” British Jews condemn @BBCPolitics after a panel of mostly non-Jews debates whether Jews are an ethnic minority.https://t.co/YxWctdd8BX

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) March 4, 2021

9. The BBC’s Coddling of Gary Lineker’s Anti-Israel Activity

Another embarrassment that has marred the BBC under Tim Davie’s leadership has been the broadcaster’s coddling of Gary Lineker’s anti-Israel social media activity.

Lineker, the BBC’s highest-paid star, had a long history of posting incendiary items on social media, receiving a light punishment for it, and continuing to enjoy the state-funded spotlight despite his crude antics.

In one notable example from January 2024, Lineker reposted a call by the pro-boycott Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) for Israel to be suspended from the global soccer federation (FIFA). Aside from the call to boycott Israel, the post also referred to the IDF’s fight against Hamas in Gaza as a “genocide.”

Ultimately, Lineker deleted the post following a public outcry and, despite the heinousness of the post, the BBC chose to ignore the episode and claim that it didn’t violate its social media guidelines.

In the end, Lineker left the BBC in May 2025, after reposting a condemnation of Zionism that featured an antisemitic motif.

Turns out that the BBC could only turn its back to Lineker’s social media antics for so long.

‘In the Qatar World Cup, he received 1.6 Million pounds in consultancy fees’

Middle East expert Tom Gross examines Prominent BBC host Gary Lineker’s ‘hypocrisy’ in his support of the boycott of Israel in international sports pic.twitter.com/LRnS5dvgTs

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) January 17, 2024

10. BBC Chair Met With Palestinian Envoy to Discuss Coverage

Under Tim Davie’s leadership, the Israel-related controversies haven’t only remained at the level of journalists and presenters but have even risen to senior management.

One example of the rot at the top is a 2022 meeting between BBC chairman Richard Sharp and Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian Authority envoy to the UK,  to “discuss the BBC’s reporting of developments in Palestine.” The meeting was commemorated with a photograph of the two men in front of a map of “Palestine” that encompasses the entire State of Israel.

Aside from this questionable photo, the fact that Sharp chose to confer with a man who whitewashes Palestinian terrorism, defends the PA’s pro-terror policies, and has been accused of denying the Holocaust shows a terrible lack of judgment at best and an explicit anti-Israel bias at worst.

Here are just some of Zomlot’s most outrageous interviews where he demonstrates his incredible ability to lie in front of the TV cameras.https://t.co/8Fk1yB8v6R

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 11, 2024

Despite its claim to impartiality and accountability, the BBC’s coverage of Israel, the Middle East, and Jewish life has been plagued by an immense bias against the Jewish state, an uncritical reliance on Palestinian narratives, and a lack of sensitivity to the experiences of the British Jewish community.

Under Tim Davie’s leadership, this flagrant bias has become an embarrassment for the British national broadcaster, miring it in unnecessary scandals and controversies.

Will the latest scandal at Glastonbury be the final straw that ends Davie’s career at the BBC and leads to a rehabilitation of the media behemoth’s journalistic integrity?

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post The BBC Is Severely Biased Against Israel: Here Are 10 of the Most Egregious Examples first appeared on Algemeiner.com.